n admitting that Lady Byron's story were
true, it never ought to have been told. Is it true, then, that a woman
has not the same right to individual justice that a man has? If the
cases were reversed, would it have been thought just that Lord Byron
should go down in history loaded with accusations of crime because he
could be only vindicated by exposing the crime of his wife?

It has been said that the crime charged on Lady Byron was comparatively
unimportant, and the one against Lord Byron was deadly.

But the 'Blackwood,' in opening the controversy, called Lady Byron by the
name of an unnatural female criminal, whose singular atrocities alone
entitle her to infamous notoriety; and the crime charged upon her was
sufficient to warrant the comparison.

Both crimes are foul, unnatural, horrible; and there is no middle ground
between the admission of the one or the other.

You must either conclude that a woman, all whose other works, words, and
deeds were generous, just, and gentle, committed this one monstrous
exceptional crime, without a motive, and against all the analogies of her
character, and all the analogies of her treatment of others; or you must
suppose that a man known by all testimony to have been boundlessly
licentious, who took the very course which, by every physiological law,
would have led to unnatural results, did, at last, commit an unnatural
crime.

The question, whether I did right, when Lady Byron was thus held up as an
abandoned criminal by the 'Blackwood,' to interpose my knowledge of the
real truth in her defence, is a serious one; but it is one for which I
must account to God alone, and in which, without any contempt of the
opinions of my fellow-creatures, I must say, that it is a small thing to
be judged of man's judgment.

I had in the case a responsibility very different from that of many
others. I had been consulted in relation to the publication of this
story by Lady Byron, at a time when she had it in her power to have
exhibited it with all its proofs, and commanded an instant conviction. I
have reason to think that my advice had some weight in suppressing that
disclosure. I gave that advice under the impression that the Byron
controversy was a thing for ever passed, and never likely to return.

It had never occurred to me, that, nine years after Lady Byron's death, a
standard English periodical would declare itself free to re-open this
controversy, when all the generation who we